


To Fill A Gap

by berhanes (sqvalors)



Series: sorry about the blood in your mouth [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, Multi-Era, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-First War with Voldemort, Post-Sirius Black in Azkaban
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-14 06:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11201949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sqvalors/pseuds/berhanes
Summary: Sirius' face is caught in a rectangle of late afternoon sun and Remus wants suddenly to reach across the three feet and fourteen years between them and touch him where the light hits. He lets himself imagine that he could, that in a moment he'll just lean forward and trace the curve between Sirius' neck and his jaw with his fingertips without it feeling like penitence. A different version of himself would've already done it. But then, a different version of himself wouldn't be here in the first place.





	To Fill A Gap

_when our ghosts come home to us,_

_we will not know what to do with them._

Haunted - Ezekiel Russell

 

 

It's a cold morning when Remus cracks open the back door to smoke barefoot in the garden and finds a too-thin black dog curled like a comma in his sparsely tended, now flattened, herbaceous border. He lights a roll-up and squints into the early sun, thinks that this could be a moment from years ago if only they were both more flesh than bone or if the feeling that registers quickest upon seeing Padfoot wasn't something like a migraine unfurling. The dog stirs, opens one dark eye. Remus rests his mug of tea on the windowsill and bends to scratch him gently behind the ear.

"I got Dumbledore's owl. Wondered when you'd arrive."

Remus has never let anything go without leaving claw marks in it - it's what comes, he supposes, of grasping at shreds of a normal life for years and having them pulled away one by one, bloody furrows carved deep but never quite deep enough. His mother used to call it resilience. Remus has called it many things in the years since, largely variations of fucking stupid, especially as there's so little to show for it. Loving Sirius Black is something he still has his fingers curled tightly around, hallowed and unspoken. The edges of it rake against the inside of his ribs like something he should atone for; of course Remus fell for a man capable of something so ugly, of course the loathing never quite won out, of course he can't forget the sleep-weight of Sirius' arm across his waist. Of course of course of course. The truth of the matter is that regardless of how often he wakes in the morning and thinks _my god, he never did any of it_ there's still a part of him that feels guilt-laden and he's not entirely sure it's for the right reasons.

He straightens and reaches for his tea, a study in composure. The dog pushes to his feet, trampling peonies as he goes. Sirius never did have much respect for gardening.

"I can put some toast in if you like. Or something more substantial. I suppose really you'll be needing more than toast." He nudges the door with a calloused heel and then nods towards the kitchen. "Go on."

Padfoot hesitates for a moment and then slinks across the threshold. Remus looks away from the sharp edges of bone shifting mechanical beneath fur and watches his cigarette burn down, glowing amber and then not at all.

 

\--

 

November 1st is a grey, rain-streaked morning teetering on the edge of autumn and he wakes to Andromeda Tonks moving around his kitchenette like she belongs there, clean mug in one hand and the fingers of the other drumming impatiently on the counter next to the kettle. Remus blinks stupidly from the doorway. Andromeda has always been somewhat of a mystery to him: another Black thrown from the nest, iron-cored and grounded because of it just as Sirius is reckless. When she meets his gaze Remus sees in her a quiet fury so familiar it hurts.

"Why are you here," he says, and the knots in his stomach tighten and tighten. He's grateful that her voice does not falter - not when she says _murdered,_ not when she says _Azkaban,_ not when she says _Sirius_. The words fall like waves, one after the other.

"Dumbledore will deal with the burials. He thinks it sensible to keep the arrangements small." A strand of flyaway hair has escaped the tight coil pinned neatly at the nape of her neck and she tucks it behind her ear, efficient in a way that contradicts her red-rimmed eyes and the way she holds the mug a little too tight. "He doesn't know I've come, so he'll probably be here later to break the news to you."

"What about Harry," he asks, instead of _what about me,_ knuckles yellow-white on the doorframe. "Where's Harry?"

“I don't know.” Andromeda won't look him in the eye, busying herself with tea leaves. “I expect he'll be cared for quietly.”

Only Dumbledore, hand of God moving across a chessboard too big for the rest of them to see, knows how Harry's future will unfold; Remus finds himself nodding absently and then has to excuse himself to vomit messily in the bathroom. Slumped on the lino in front of the toilet he drags the back of one hand across his mouth and waits for the white noise behind his eyes to dissipate. The last time he was sick like this was the night before the Full two months ago and Sirius had brought him tea and charmed a flannel cool and sat silently on the edge of the bath until he was done; they hadn't spoken for almost a fortnight prior and Remus had hardly expected him to be home let alone willing to be in the same room. He'd all but forgotten about it but now it strikes him with such a pointed clarity he has to lurch over the toilet again, eyes screwed tight. 

Eventually he coaxes his leaden limbs upright and fumbles for the tap, the porcelain of the basin-edge cool against his shaking hands as he lets the water run. It doesn't feel like he imagines it should, having your life erased around you. Truthfully it's felt like a drawn out execution ever since the war began and to have the final blow delivered so swiftly just seems as if fate is being unusually kind in its efficiency, getting the bulk of the loss over with at once. He's grateful that the news comes from Andromeda in his kitchen and not the _Prophet_ in Diagon Alley, grateful that he can throw up here instead of retching into the gutter. There's a sick unfurling in his chest that feels a lot like relief; the sour taste of it weighs heavy on his tongue no matter how often he rinses his mouth. 

When he trudges back to the kitchen there's a mug of tea waiting on the counter. Andromeda is gone and Remus is grateful for that too.

What do you do with the knowledge that you buried your secrets in a man with his own buried deeper?

 

\--

 

Sirius is sat at the kitchen table, just as brittle and threadbare as he had been as Padfoot, when Remus comes back inside and slices two wedges of granary for the toaster. Remus keeps his eyes on the knife as he goes, then sweeps the debris into his palm until he holds a tiny pyramid of crumbs. He sprinkles them out onto the windowsill for the birds and says: "I can put the kettle on?"

"Just water for me I think."

Remus nods and fetches a mug down anyway, the handle better for shaking fingers. Behind him Sirius coughs like a machine full of dust.

"I don't have to stay long, be a nuisance. Don't mind sleeping out in the open much anymore. Prefer it a little."

"There's plenty of space." Remus sets a plate carefully next to the toaster, thinks _Sirius Black, always the martyr_ and then chastises himself for it. "Butter or jam?"

"Neither, if that's all the same."

"All right." Remus moves mechanically. Sirius has tracked mud across the tiles.

How would this be if there wasn't a gulf of fourteen years stretching behind them? Remus wants so badly to know how this scene would play out if they had arrived at it differently. He knows the bare bones - Sirius would have raspberry jam spread in uneven lumps on his toast and a mug of black tea, three sugars, at his elbow. One of them would read the music reviews in the paper and the other the TV guide, seated just so, swapping between the two and circling items of interest with a biro that doubled up as a teaspoon. Swiping through cut scene moments like this feels clinical and impersonal, but it helps distract from the reality of Sirius cradling a mug with fingers crusted with what could be blood or dirt, rust-red in the creases of his knuckles and the curves of his nails. Should the crossword come first or the radio? Tea then toast, or toast then tea? Which recycled memory of slow mornings or ankles linked under the table should come next?

The toast pops up right on cue and Remus stacks it neatly before handing the plate across the kitchen table. He doesn't know how to fix any of this.

Later, Sirius is sitting crooked in a bath now more silt than water and Remus lays out a clean set of clothes neatly folded by the bathroom door. There are at least three layers, because the house is cold even in the summer and Sirius is far too thin and a jumper is kinder than pointing this out. The bathroom door hasn't had a working lock for years and through the gap Remus could count the notches of Sirius' spine if he let himself linger long enough. Instead he builds the living room fire a little higher than he usually allows himself and sits at his desk in an attempt to look like he's doing something other than waiting. When Sirius finally pads down the stairs, one creak at a time, Remus isn't even sure what he's waiting for.

 

\--

 

He's told he will be lonelyfrom the age of five. It goes unsaid, in the way his mother tucks him in at night and the way his father squeezes his shoulder a little too tightly when they see him off at Kings Cross. They live in the middle of nowhere and the stars shine bright but always far away, too far away, and Remus hears it loud and clear: you are lonely and you will continue to be lonely. It's just how things are when you're eleven and already more scar than skin.

And then - it's the middle of first year and James Potter is asking if it's alright if he uses Remus' trunk as somewhere to store his excess dungbombs, just until he and Sirius have unleashed their next attack on their peers, and Remus is saying _i think so yes_. It's the week before Easter and Remus is pulled backwards by his robes into a broom cupboard and Sirius is hissing something in his ear about a suit of armour he's just hexed to chase the next student that walks by and he wasn't planning on that student being one of his friends, and Remus zeroes in on that one golden word and holds it safe in his fist. It's coming up to their end of year exams and Peter is letting him read back on notes he's missed and _it's a pain that you've been ill such a lot isn't it_ and Remus is smiling anyway. He smiles a lot, those first months. He's never complacent - always acutely aware that his facade could start to splinter if his friends are curious enough, right until the moment they prove they are and it doesn't - but he smiles a lot. They break laws for him and he asks them why and it's Sirius who says _because we can_. It's the same thing he says in the first ten minutes of 1978, when he kisses Remus against the doorframe of the pantry in the Potters' kitchenand Remus asks again _._

So Remus wasn't lonely. For eleven years he wasn't lonely and now he is, like some sort of awful symmetry, like something fucking poetic, and if he thinks about it too hard it sticks in his throat until he chokes.

He leaves the flat once in the immediate aftermath of Halloween and regrets it almost immediately. Diagon Alley is electric for the first time for over a year, claustrophobic and full of joy bright enough to blind him. He jostles his way to a news stand and hovers over the _Prophet,_ the front page taken over by a picture of Sirius laughing, mouth wide and obscene, and then he has to duck into a shop doorway to catch his breath, heart thrumming a constant beat of accusations. Sirius has blood on his hands and Remus would still let him touch him if he could.

Here's the thing, about Sirius - it shouldn't be as difficult as it is to reconcile the man Remus knows with the man he apparently didn't. Sirius always had a cruel streak, a selfish bent to him, a knack for being despicable without really thinking; Remus doubts he could help it, sometimes. There's something classically tragic about the fall of the house of Black and if he weren't stood so close to the wreckage Remus might find it intriguing. Lying awake at night on the sofa because he can't bring himself to even look at their bed, Remus doesn't find it anything but hollow.

The loss aches, but it doesn't so much as feel like a hole through him as a widening of a gap that was already there, plastered over with half-hearted apologies and self-preserving excuses. He tries to replace what's missing with cheap spirits, then sometimes with men in worn out leather jackets, with hipbones that cut his hands **.** The first man asks Remus to take him home and he doesn't have the words to say how much that would feel like sacrilege. They wind up in a bedsit across London instead and he drinks too much vodka, lets this stranger's spidery fingers trace the fault lines on his chest, _what the fuck happened to you,_ and it feels like sacrilege anyway.

Before November fades Remus packs up some clothes and the salvageable fragments of the flat into a charmed rucksack - dog-eared books, a box of loose photographs neatly dated in biro, a jacket that could've belonged to either of them but smells too much like Sirius for Remus to contemplate wearing again - and leaves the door unlocked behind him.

 

\--

 

Sirius looks better clean. Still bruised under the eyes, still hollowed out, but the bath has softened his edges a little. The jumper Remus left out is too big, as predicted - it hangs loose at shoulders that would've pulled it taut, once, and Sirius rubs the hem absently between his fingers as he hovers in the doorway like he's haunting the place.

"Thanks for the clothes."

Remus twists to face him, elbow resting on the back of his chair. "Couldn't have you roaming around in what you came in, even with the nearest neighbours a mile out."

"Not sure mustard is quite my colour, though." Sirius makes a noise that could almost be a laugh and edges further into the room. Remus is watching him and pretending he isn't; it's something he used to do when the war threatened to swallow them both, like he was searching for a sign he should burn everything down and disappear. Sirius folds himself into the corner of the sofa nearest the fire and Remus glances back to his desk.

"I could trim your hair, if you want. Tidy up the beard situation too, unless you're going for the rugged older man look." Here is where I can be useful, please let me be useful. "Later, I mean. Tomorrow even."

Sirius presses the fingertips of one hand to his face as if he'd forgotten he could, and then looks Remus in the eye for the first time all evening and says, "All right."

Remus stands and moves to the sofa before he can convince himself to keep his distance. He doesn't want this to feel as clunky as it does, as if neither one of them is sure if the ground they're treading is firm enough to hold them up.

"You can stay as long as you like, you know," he says quietly, hesitant, as if it's the most outrageous thing he could possibly be saying to a man who's seen him in more than one compromising position over the years. “So long as it's safe for you.”

"Would I have to wear more dubious shades of yellow?"

Remus leans back against the sofa, one foot tucked under him, and listens to the fire crack. "I'm sure I could find you something more colourful if you like. I've probably still got that horrific orange cardigan."

"Think I donated that to Oxfam in '79, actually. Or set it on fire." Sirius smiles and shifts until they're facing each other like opposing parentheses. His face is caught in a rectangle of late afternoon sun and Remus wants suddenly to reach across the three feet and fourteen years between them and touch him where the light hits. He lets himself imagine that he could, that in a moment he'll just lean forward and trace the curve between Sirius' neck and his jaw with his fingertips without it feeling like penitence. A different version of himself would've already done it. But then, a different version of himself wouldn't be here in the first place and he's so tired.

 

\--

 

Remus doesn't have a plan, exactly, when he leaves London. Despite that it somehow doesn't come as a surprise that he finds himself on the doorstep of his parents' - father's, now - cottage in the middle of November, soaked to the skin and kept upright only by sheer willpower and an obliging garden wall. Very little about the house seems to have changed since he was last here: the front door is flaking green paint a little and there's a hum of quiet magic around the frame so it seems unlikely that his father has fixed the doorbell, at least not in the muggle sense. The air is crisp with rain, the yellow-green ivy that clings to the brick front shining in the glow from the bay window and the weak _lumos_ Remus is trying to maintain despite the fact his fingers lost all feeling half a mile back.

The door finally opens and Lyall stands and stares for a handful of moments before ushering him into the hall without a word. Remus doesn't blame him for looking uncertain. It's been two years of minimal contact, distance invoked by the war and Remus' fear that his father would see the person he'd become and not know what to do with him, how to navigate around the unspoken grief weighing him down long before there was loss to merit it.

Remus stands dripping over the tiles and Lyall looks at him over the top of his glasses and says, "This is unexpected."

Remus can't help the startled little laugh that comes then, bubbling up at the absurdity of the entire situation. He wants to explain himself properly, so his father will stop looking at him like he's a Howler about to explode, but his teeth are chattering and his fingers are numb and he's still laughing, a nervous hateful noise he wishes would stop, until it twists into something ugly and he's choking out sobs as the rain runs in rivulets from his hair into his eyes. There are hands on his shoulders and then Lyall is pulling him down and in, holding him steady.

"I'm getting wet all over you," Remus says after a while, because it's something mundane to say and unearthing anything else feels like pulling teeth. "And the tiles."

"Nothing a little wand-waving won't sort out." Lyall pushes him to arms length and studies him carefully, frowning a little. Remus feels about six years old. "Have you eaten?"

Remus shrugs and drags the cuff of his sleeve across his nose. There was a round of toast in the recent past but he can't remember if it was this morning's breakfast or last night's tea so he doesn't mention it.

"I could almost count your ribs through that coat." Lyall's mouth is a thin worried line.

"I'm fine."

"I'll warm something up for you after I've fetched a towel."

"Okay."

"Did you fly here?" Lyall asks, glancing over Remus' shoulder in search of a broom he probably knows he won't find. Remus shakes his head.

"Got the Knight Bus as far as it goes and then walked the rest." He could've apparated if he'd had the energy, or if walking three miles in the pouring rain didn't feel like suitable punishment for the amount of self pity he's indulged in recently. He can't feel his toes.

"I'd have come and got you if you'd said.” His father keeps glancing at various parts of him as if searching for hairline fractures, cracks that might let the light in. “The fire's on in the front if you want to go through. Let's get some of these layers off you first."

Remus lets himself be helped out of his coat and when Lyall starts to pull his sodden jumper over his head as well he doesn't have the energy to protest. He's well aware that his father's careful avoidance of the reasons behind this visit is a tactic rooted in years of patience, of knowing when to stand back and wait for answers to manifest, but it's still a relief to meet no resistance. Lyall will approach him like he'd approach a wounded animal and Remus will let him.

Half an hour later they're sitting in the living room in the orange glow of the fire and Remus is wrapped in a too-small dressing gown, holding a mug of tea so tight it hurts, fingers burning just enough to remind him he's awake. If he closes his eyes it's almost as if the last ten years haven't happened at all. His father hasn't asked many questions but then the news has been full of so little else lately it's unlikely he needs to. The ugly details of it all are immortalised in headlines that absolve Remus of having to explain himself, of having to pour salt in wounds not yet scabbed over. He wonders vaguely if he could even find the words.

"You shouldn't blame yourself for what he did," Lyall says, and Remus can feel him watching.

"I don't," Remus says, which is of course a lie and a laughable one at that. He doesn't look up from his tea.

“People are always full of surprises.” His father shifts in his seat, sighs softly through his nose. “Sometimes it's just hard to get a handle on them.”

If you'd asked Remus a year ago whether he thought he understood Sirius Black he'd have laughed quietly and shrugged, said _depends on circumstance,_ maybe winked depending on how drunk he was or who was asking. Of course he understood Sirius: you can't live on top of someone for over a decade and not learn how they operate. Remus could easily have explained how Sirius dealt with schoolwork, which was to stave it off until the last minute and scrape good grades regardless and much to everyone else's chagrin. He could explain how there was a particular smile Sirius had when he was pleased, genuinely so, with how a plan was coming along – a secret sort of smile that made his eyes crinkle just a little at the corners. He could explain the ways Sirius shut down when a letter from home arrived or when he passed Regulus in the cavernous halls of Hogwarts or came out of a Slytherin fight bloody and black-eyed and burning everything he touched. Even so it's difficult to deny that Sirius is full of surprises. Remus has only to look at the gutted remains of his life to see that.

"There were so many moments when I should have known." Remus sees them all in lurid technicolour before the words are even out of his mouth, from the incident with Snape to the last month of nausea and all the small contemptible red flags flickering in between.

"Hindsight is a wonderful thing," says his father, dryly but not unkindly. He waves a hand at the fireplace and the flames jump a little higher. He folds his glasses in his hands. Weighs his next words carefully. "You aren't at fault, Remus. Not for anything."

Remus look up. In four years he's never told his father about Sirius being anything other than what he knows him to be already, never saw the point of running the risk of giving Lyall another reason to be disappointed in him, but it's clear now that he's slotted the pieces together all by himself. It doesn't feel like Remus thought it would, having his father see that part of himself. Maybe if this had happened at another point in time. Maybe if Remus didn't feel bruised all over, and maybe if Sirius wasn't a murderer, and maybe if that didn't sound like a punchline, somehow - _haha, yes i am, yes we were, but then he went and sold us out, the bastard, I really know how to pick 'em –_ then there'd be something more tangible _._ Lyall is looking at him and Remus wishes he had something to say. He takes a mouthful of tea just to scald his tongue, and draws the dressing gown closer around his shoulders.

 

\--

 

It takes under a week for the eggshells to crack beneath his feet. Sirius is sat at the kitchen table after sleeping for almost two days straight and Remus is pacing under the guise of tidying away the breakfast things and they're talking about everything without really talking about anything, the conversation threatening to boil over. Sirius keeps saying half a sentence and then falling silent for great lengths of time that make Remus want to shake him.

"It's been hard, is all, coping sometimes _._ By myself."

"You didn't have to be." Sirius doesn't look at him. Sirius has hardly looked at him in fifteen minutes.

"I had everything explode in my face in twenty-four hours. I thought you'd massacred an entire street and lied to me for months and you think I should've just bounced back? I thought you'd got everyone I cared about killed, Sirius." His voice shakes with the recoil of it _._

"Remind me, which one of us was rotting in a cell for twelve years?"

"Don't fucking, don't fucking do that. That's not fair," he says. Sirius smirks then, a jagged thing that makes Remus want to hit him. His heart beats hollow in his chest. "I still wanted you here. I read every article and listened to every lecture from Dumbledore and I believed them, I _believed_ them, and I still wanted you here." He wants to ask if Sirius knows how that feels, to be strung out so taut, but of course he does. Sirius has almost fourteen years of wanting buried beneath his skin.

"Never pegged you as the selfish type, personally. Always thought that was more my role," Sirius says, flatly. His mouth lifts at the corner again but there's little spite left in it. He softens easier than he did at twenty-one, and Remus tucks this observation away with everything else that makes him want to scream himself hoarse. Sirius stares at his hands. "There's nothing to say, is there. Not really."

Remus has a lot of things he wants to say. When he was younger and more inclined to such things he'd filled notebooks with pages and pages of furious unsent letters and things he never thought he'd get to say. Letters to Dumbledore, written drunk or stoned and full of words scored through so deeply with biro that the following pages echoed them back at him. Letters to Sirius, equal parts vitriolic and pathetically lovelorn: Dear Sirius did you ever mean a word of what you said, Dear Sirius I hope they take fucking everything, Dear Sirius I almost forgot where you are in the stars _._ Sometimes he'd write to Harry, digging up the soft parts of himself as an exercise in excavation. Remus hasn't done any of these things for years. There are only so many times you can pick the same stitches out.

He wonders if Sirius remembers everything as clearly as he does or if Azkaban has blurred the edges. Instead of asking he leans against the counter and says, "No, I suppose not," his throat full of _did you really think that of me did you really think I was capable did you not know me at all_ and the truth of it is that none of that really matters now, anyway, would get neither of them anywhere fast. He's spent so long thinking so much worse of Sirius and those years are threaded through his hair in silver; he wants to pull each and every one out and start again.

"You've got that face on, the one you do when you're not saying things." Sirius raises an eyebrow.

"No I haven't."

"Now you just look angry."

"I'm not angry." Remus turns away and taps the kettle with his wand, reaches for two mugs, opens a new box of Earl Grey. Figure one: a man trying very hard to keep his seams stitched tight.

"You're doing an excellent impression of someone who is, then."

"I'd forgotten how bloody infuriating you can be." Neither of them speak for the time it takes Remus to pour out two cups of tea and when he turns to face him Sirius is staring vacantly again, knee tapping like a drill against the table leg. Remus sets both mugs down and then sits opposite, sliding into Sirius' line of sight and wondering if he even registers it.

 

\--

 

His father dies in the autumn of 1990. The head of an officer from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures burns green in Remus' tiny fireplace in Edinburgh to let him know, which Remus would find impersonal and a little insensitive if he could muster up the will. They keep track of their retired staff and their next of kin in case high profile cases come back to bite them further down the line, “Although mercifully that's not the case here,” he says, and then he has the good grace to look horrified as he lets the words go and realises who he's speaking to. Remus stares at him, stony faced and silent. The floo connection closes shortly after that.

He doesn't stay on to finish his teaching contract.

It's easier, he finds, moving to fill the space left by his father instead of having to fit his grief into the gaps between the two of them **.** Remus was never very good at doing that when his feelings got too big for him. The summer before second year, when he came home from Hogwarts brimming with something like belonging, he'd pushed his excitement into every corner of the house until even the garden seemed to bloom with it. It's almost a relief to have neither parent alive to come home to with a decade of extra emotional baggage.

The house is an old comfort and he moves through it like something temporary, the first few weeks. He breathes in years he'd forgotten and leaves little evidence of himself other than his fingerprints in the dust on the mantel and mugs abandoned on the sideboard. Eventually he begins to settle deeper - shelves his books, tunes the radio to his liking, tries to become someone used to living alone. At some point in late January he entertains the idea of dragging out his stack of letters and using them as kindling, only it's hard to tell if he just wants to give himself an excuse to read every scribbled page over and over for the first time in years,so he leaves them locked in his trunk upstairs. He gets new letters he can drop into the fire anyway, addressed shamelessly in Dumbledore's sweeping hand. Remus wonders if the professor knows that he isn't so much as opening them before setting them alight and decides he probably does.

He spends the first fortnight of spring elbow deep in soil. He works with the radio balanced on a garden chair, methodically replanting the flowering borders of the garden for hours until all he can think of are tulip bulbs and slug repelling charms, pressing his palms into the dirt around each new stemuntil he feels some small sense of satisfaction. He falls asleep with dirt under his nails and an ache in his back reminding him of everything he's trying to bury, and it's almost enough.

 

\--

 

The evening after the almost-argument Remus retreats to the garden with some research notes and an almost empty packet of tobacco and the intention to finish both of them. Within an hour Sirius is lingering in the kitchen doorway, bony fingers wrapped around a cup of tea offered as some sort of olive branch they both know is largely unnecessary at this point. His hair lies shower-damp against his neck, dripping dark splotches onto another of Remus' t-shirts, a grey shapeless thing that hangs loose across Sirius' collarbone. He pads barefoot to where Remus is sitting cross legged on the patio in the dwindling daylight.

"Do you always work outside at night?" Sirius asks, hovering uncertainly for a moment before lowering himself to sit opposite. He places the tea between them and Remus sighs and offers him the roll-up he hasn't started yet.

"Only when it's warm enough." He squints across as Sirius makes himself comfortable. "You sound like hell as it is, should I have given you that?"

"Think the damage is done if I'm honest." Sirius stares at the sky for a moment, elbows propped on his knees, and then sparks his cigarette wordlessly. It's a trick he would've accompanied with a wink or a click of his fingers, once upon a time. Remus watches him inhale and waits for the rattling cough. He doesn't say I told you so when it comes.

Eventually Sirius breathes deep and says, "Still getting used to seeing so much sky."

Remus imagines how Azkaban is situated, the only thing between the sea and the sky for miles and miles of disorientating grey, but seeing the sky through a foot-wide rectangle is probably not the same as seeing it from the Quidditch stands. He shifts his pile of paperwork to one side and wraps his hands around the tea to warm them.

"It'll be a clear night, too, from the looks of things.”

"Not a bad view you've got at Chez Lupin. I forgot." Sirius tilts his chin towards the pile of notes. "What are you writing?"

"Just an article on centaur relations, for a magazine up in Northumbria. Little thing, supposed to be circulated around their trainee community officers."

"Sounds thrilling."

"I'll have that fag back if you're not careful." They're sitting close but not touching. Remus isn't sure which one of them is more conscious of it, this deliberate carving of separate space. Historically speaking it's usually been him - Sirius has never been too concerned with where his limbs are at any particular moment and Remus has never done anything without calculating the angles of his body at all times, at least not sober.

"What you said earlier," Sirius says, studying his hands. "I understand. Or I mean, I think I do. It was hard in Azkaban, to want anything other than to not be in Azkaban. To want anything, actually."

“I know.” Remus says it even though he has tried hard not to imagine what being in Azkaban is like. Often he thinks the closest he can get is the feeling he had as a child leading up to the Full – dread laden, waiting and waiting for something clawing and awful to rend him apart in slow motion, only in Azkaban the something awful never comes. Remus supposes in a wry sense that maybe this makes them even, both equally as fucked up as the other. He doesn't look at Sirius. "Did you think about me?"

Sirius frowns at him like he's said something absurd, cigarette clamped at the corner of his mouth. "Of course I did."

"I wondered sometimes if you'd forget."

"Did you forget?"

"No."

"There we are then," Sirius says, shrugging one shoulder. "Sometimes I thought it might be better to forget all at once instead of having bits and pieces siphoned off, though."

Remus finds a crack in the paving and follows it with his eyes until it reaches the lawn, grass resiliently finding somewhere to inch in between the slabs and take root. "I think forgetting is a luxury not everyone gets. Sometimes it feels like everything is filed away safe in my head whether I want it there or not."

"There must be good bits tucked away up there." Sirius passes back the rest of the roll-up and studies him carefully. "There must have been good bits in the time since."

Remus holds the smoke in his lungs. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Sirius still watching, waiting for something. He wants to tell him about the years spent working poorly paid defence jobs, the handful of men he's been with, but he's not sure if when Sirius asks about the decade he lost he actually wants answers or if he'll resent him for wasting so much time in the same way Remus resents himself. He drinks some more of his tea, chooses his words. "I did try. To _move on,_ do things other than wallow. I just wasn't very good at it."

"Did you try very hard." Still knows how to press on a bruise, even after all this time.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Sirius, who isn't looking at him anymore, who is tapping an insistent rhythm on his knee, says, "It doesn't matter."

When Remus was ten he'd screamed his throat raw across the kitchen table at his father, who stood stoic and silent until he was done, watching him fizzle out. Because Remus was ten, this had made it worse - what was the point if the other person didn't yell back, if nothing stuck, if they just stood and waited? Remus had thrown five years of fear and pain across the kitchen and Lyall had hardly batted an eyelid. Afterwards, heaving exhausted ugly sobs and shaking with something unnameable, he'd let his father pull him close. Lyall had held his head against his chest and said _sometimes there are things, awful things, that we can't change. we just have to know that and get by anyway._

Sirius looks smudged in the half-light of evening and Remus desperately wants to know the awful things and get by anyway. He stubs out the cigarette and pushes to his feet, gathering his notes under one arm in an untidy bundle. He finishes his tea and lets the mug swing from his fingers.

Sirius squints up at him a little incredulously. "Did your knees just make that noise?"

"Probably," Remus sighs. "Lycanthropy and poor nutrition will do that to you. I think I'm going to dig out a bottle of wine or something, we can sit out here if it stays clear. Will you come and help me find a blanket?"

"If you wanted to keep working, I can go-"

"Sirius, just come inside."

 

\--

 

The job offer comes when he's eating cold beans on toast made with bread he's already had to hack the green edges from and Remus doesn't think he's ever hated an envelope so vehemently before. He lets it sit on the counter all morning, hands curled almost involuntarily into fists whenever he catches sight of it out of the corner of his eye. The owl that delivered it taps impatiently at the kitchen windowsill the longer he leaves her with no reply.

It wouldn't surprise him if Dumbledore knew, somehow, that there was more dust in the pantry than food, or that Remus has already had to Obliviate the man from the water company three times. It's something Dumbledore would do, make sure the letter arrived as the money ran out, as if he doesn't think Remus would be self-righteous enough to starve for the sake of old convictions. The fact that Remus isn't self-righteous enough to starve for the sake of old convictions makes everything worse.

There's something about such a slow-burn betrayal that lasts, he's found. Something about how long it takes for realisation to dawn that makes it impossible to ever get the stain out. Dumbledore gave him an education but he also made choices that left most of his friends dead or insane or incarcerated and Remus figures that tips the scale rather to Dumbledore's detriment, greater good or not.

The owl squawks to remind him she's there and Remus sighs, head in his hands. He has nothing to tie him here. He is empty and exhausted and could easily drop everything and Dumbledore knows.

So: Remus reads the letter through twice more before holding the corner over the hob and watching it burn blue.

So: he boards the Hogwarts Express on September 1st, heart in his throat.

So: he feels eleven years old and sixteen and thirty-three all at once. In the beginning it knocks him off balance whenever he catches sight of Harry and forgets, briefly, that he isn't the boy he thinks he is. Remus recognises other echoes in his classes and smiles at all of them. He is careful to treat them gently.

 

\--

 

There isn't any wine in the end, but Remus finds an unopened bottle of scotch whisky at the back of his father's antique drinks cabinet and decides it'll do. He's not entirely sure why this feels like a good idea - mostly he wants the tension settled in the pit of his stomach to unravel and thinks that maybe then he'll start feeling less like he's going round in circles that keep getting smaller. Sirius is in his house for the first time in so many years, standing less than a metre away, and Remus is tired of winding through the same arguments. He's been tired most of his life, a bone-deep ache that waxes and wanes but never really leaves, and now he wants to drop the trapdoor on the last fourteen years and pretend they were always going to end up in the living room of his parents' old house, a bottle of whisky between them and the fire dying slowly in the grate.

Remus fetches two tumblers and pours a measure of scotch into each at his desk and then tops each one up a little more. "Are you warm enough? I can fetch you a jumper."

"I'll be all right," says Sirius, dragging a patchwork throw from the rocking chair in the window and bundling it into his arms. He stands in front of the fire and watches Remus expectantly.

Remus tucks the bottle under his arm and hovers with a tumbler in each hand. He tries a smile. "All right then. Lead the way." He hands Sirius one of the glasses and then watches him amble from the living room.

When he gets outside he finds Sirius standing on the lawn, staring at the purpling sky. He's spread the quilt out on the grass and Remus quietly sits down a safe distance across from him. The patchwork squares in his corner are varying shades of floral cotton, bed sheets his mother mutilated before he was born, and Remus nestles the scotch on an uneven patch of paisley.

"Your dad didn't seem the scotch type," Sirius says. He glances down, hands loosely tucked into the pockets of his jeans.

"Never opened the bottle, did he, so." Remus leans back on one arm and closes his eyes. "That probably proves your point."

Sirius pauses with the glass at his lips. "Good judge of character, me."

Not always, Remus wants to say, not when it mattered. Instead he downs his drink and focuses on the burning in his throat. Sirius seems to hear it in the silence anyway and smiles wryly, and then finally sits down. He hunches over his knees and absently worries the satin edge of the quilt between his fingers, eyes fixed pointedly ahead, gone again. Remus sighs.

"Do you want a top up?" He asks knowing Sirius' glass isn't empty yet.

Sirius doesn't acknowledge him at first, and then seems to snap into himself, slides back into his skin like he's remembering how it works. He looks quizzical until Remus gestures with the bottle and then he offers his glass, holding it steady while Remus pours.

"Not sure what my tolerance is like these days."

"Was never particularly high to start with," Remus says. "Remember James' and Lily's wedding? Three glasses of wine and you were practically sobbing." The memory cuts into his head, bright and blurred like a poorly developed photograph. Remus refills his own glass.

"Didn't throw up in their front garden though, did I?"

Remus smiles; he'd had too many cocktails and vomited pink into Lily's magnolias, laughing against the slick of Sirius' neck until he was dizzy with it. He didn't think Sirius would remember. He didn't think he'd remember, not fully. Shards of history glinting in the dwindling daylight.

There have been times when he would've gladly torn Sirius to shreds, stripped him to the bone, just to quieten the rage roaring in his own ears. He lets his head fall back and stares at the sky.

"God, I'm so tired of being fucking miserable all the time."

Sirius laughs a little at that and Remus hears the clink of glass against teeth. When he lifts his head Sirius is still looking down the length of the garden, the breeze tangling his hair. He doesn't seem present, somehow, and if Remus were to reach out he fears his fingers would go straight through him and he'd find Sirius had never been there at all. It doesn't even seem unlikely, that's the thing - of everything that's happened, every false start and misstep so far, hallucinating a repentant Sirius Black is something Remus finds entirely fucking believable of himself.

"I argued a bit, when Dumbledore said I should come to you," Sirius says, quietly. "Didn't think it'd be good for either of us after what happened that night - with Peter, I mean - but he was adamant, stubborn old bastard."

"He sent a very cryptic owl."

"There's a fucking surprise." Sirius stares into his glass, suspended in the cats-cradle of his fingers. His hair has curled as it's dried, dark curves brushing his shoulders in a way that reminds Remus of early mornings and robes in disarray and the liminal moments after the Full when everything stank of blood and pine. He could catch one of those curls between his fingers right now, if he wanted. If he wanted.

"You haven't been completely miserable for fourteen years, have you?" Sirius asks suddenly, looking across at him.

"You know me, glutton for punishment."

"I'm serious."

"I suppose there have been moments, but mostly it's been like wading through fog." Remus watches Sirius' face fall - and hadn't he been expecting that? Hadn't he wanted to see Sirius realise, again, just how dismantled he's been? - and finishes the rest of his drink. He wonders if Sirius would look as crestfallen if the answer had been different.

“Nice to hear you spent your time well, then.” Sirius grimaces, glances away.

"I spent a nice six months in Venice in '86, actually. Lots of old buildings full of ghouls people wanted rid of." Sirius has reached for the bottle while Remus has been talking and he seems closer, touchable. Remus watches him with a warm sort of detachment caused by the whisky, probably, and then lets himself fall back on the quilt, his head landing gently on an uneven square of blue polka dots. "You know despite the fact that you seem constantly disappointed that I've wasted my life I'm glad you're here."

Sirius smiles a little at that. "Yeah?"

"Mm."

"I wasn't sure if you'd want to see me."

"You've been here almost a week, it's a bit late for that don't you think." Remus rolls onto his side and reaches out, fingers finding the back of Sirius' hand, ghosting gently over the bird bones of his knuckles. They've been moving in such careful orbits of each other he's surprised that Sirius doesn't flinch away. "Of course I'd want to see you."

Sirius shrugs awkwardly, resting on his elbows. "Wasn't sure if I wanted to see you either, truth be told."

"Well, that's charming."

"No, I just." Sirius rolls his eyes and sets his empty tumbler to the side of the quilt, shifting until they're facing each other. "Everything in my head is a right mess, all jumbled. I forgot the order things happened in."

Remus remembers the shack and Harry, remembers skittish laughter and Sirius twining his hands together over and over and over. He'd clung to Sirius then without thinking, as the moon cast jagged shadows through the cracks in the walls and everything seemed far away and too close all at once.

"You go very soft around the eyes when you drink," Sirius says. Remus thinks about kissing him.

"Do I."

"Mm. Always have done."

Remus can't remember the last time he felt like this, as if regret wasn't the only thing holding all of his pieces together, creaking and on the verge of collapse. He never thought he'd be able to look at Sirius and not want to kill him, but then he never thought he'd be able to look at Sirius at all and here they are. 

“Do you think,” Sirius starts. He wets his lips.

“I have been known to,” Remus says. “On occasion.”

“No I mean. Do you think this is all right.”

Remus thinks it's inevitable, which probably isn't the same thing at all. “Yes,” he says.

Sirius is so close. The night ruffles his hair around his face and the slice of his jaw and Remus wants, in a nostalgic schoolboy sort of way, to take a picture of him and watch the way he closes his eyes against the breeze over and over again. Freeze the calm before the storm - and there will be a storm, Remus can sense it deep in his marrow like before, a scything. Sirius is leaning close enough for Remus to see the points of his teeth when he smiles.

“I missed you.” The words all thread together and Remus isn't sure if they're even audible but he leans forwards and runs the palm of his hand along Sirius' jaw, his temple, fingers threading into still-damp hair and taking root. “God Sirius, I missed you all the time.”

Sirius breathes out against the swell of Remus' bottom lip and Remus thinks that if he closes his eyes now his head will spin, if he closes his eyes now the next time he opens them he'll be waking up alone in the hollow of his room with guilt pooling heavy in his stomach like it has for years and years, a decade even, and nothing will have changed at all. Sirius has one hand splayed hot against his ribs and their noses are touching just, just, just. When Remus kisses him Sirius opens his mouth and presses him closer, tentative in a way he wasn't expecting. Remus doesn't close his eyes.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this went through a couple of titles in the year-and-a-bit i've been sat on it before i reverted back to its original, which is shamelessly swiped from the emily dickinson poem of the same name. thanks for reading!


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